All I Want From LinkedIn For Christmas Is…

December 14, 2015 / in LinkedIn / by Mic Johnson

Post author: Mic Johnson

For those of you who are regular readers of the Blue Gurus blog (Thank you. We LOVE you.), you might recall that I recently wrote a blog post titled “How to Personalize Invitations on LinkedIn’s Mobile App.”

It wasn’t obvious how to do it and that’s why I wrote the post. Of course just a couple of weeks later, LinkedIn rolled out a new version of their mobile app and do you know what happened?

THEY TOOK AWAY THE ABILITY TO PERSONALIZE INVITATIONS VIA THE MOBILE APP!

In other words, they took away a feature that ENCOURAGES ENGAGEMENT between their members.

When I saw that LinkedIn was updating their app, I thought for sure (and was hoping and praying as this has long been one of my complaints with LinkedIn) that the default behavior when you click the blue CONNECT button anywhere on LinkedIn would be the option to personalize your connection request.

NOPE!

I immediately sent a tweet to @LinkedInHelp and LinkedIn CEO @jeffweiner (he didn’t respond, but LinkedIn Help did) asking if this was a joke. It wasn’t.

And they told me to go to the Desktop application (Wait, what? You know that EVERYONE uses mobile these days, right?) to personalize messages

Which reminds me…the only way to personalize a connection request on LinkedIn currently is if you click the blue CONNECT button when you are ON SOMEONE’S PROFILE ON THE DESKTOP APPLICATION.

If you click it anywhere else, it sends the dreaded “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn” message.

I did a little digging (see below) and apparently the ability to personalize messages in the mobile app will be covered in a future release.

I love LinkedIn for a million reasons and preach about it during our LinkedIn Training sessions with companies. But they need to fix this…and quickly. Far too many “I’d like to send you an impersonal default LinkedIn message and not have any engagement with you at all or tell you why I even want to connect” messages are being sent every single day by LinkedIn’s 400 million users.

So help me out, LinkedIn. All I want for Christmas is the ability to PERSONALIZE CONNECTION REQUESTS FROM YOUR MOBILE APP.

Signed,

Jolly St. Mic